The Angola 3 in Political Media Review

It
is no secret that the United States does not hesitate to incarcerate.
While the US only represents 5% of the global population, it cages
nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners-approximately 2.3 million people. Of
these 2.3 million people, approximately half are African American (13%
of US population). Of course, the vastly disproportionate caging and
state coercion of African Americans in the US has a long and brutal
history. This bloody legacy is made manifest in prisons like Angola,
named for the country from which many southern plantation slaves were
abducted. The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation
details the history of not only Angola prison, but the broader struggle
between the US police state and organizations like the Black Panthers
over the rights and quality of life of African Americans in the US.

The
legacy of slavery is ever present in Angola prison. Before the American
Civil War, Angola was a plantation owned by slave trader Isaac
Franklin. The prison first opened during the Civil War Reconstruction
period and its first warden was a Confederate officer. Vagrancy laws
were originally used to imprison freed slaves and ensure their free
labor through state coercion. Today, Angola still holds an almost
exclusively African American population (over 80%), and operates as a
plantation where inmates are forced to conduct backbreaking field labor
for the state of Louisiana and its corporate partners. As scholars such
as Angela Davis (2003) note of prisons like Angola, the white overseer
has been replaced by the prison guard on horseback, the slave replaced
by the incarcerated “black criminal.” Indeed, Angola prison reminds us
that many things have not changed in a country whose wealth and power
was built on the backs of various populations of color-namely African
Americans.

In the film, director Jimmy O’Halligan
documents the lives of three Angola prisoners and their quest for
freedom from incarceration. Herman Wallace, Robert King (AKA Robert King
Wilkerson), and Albert Woodfox are the men known as the “Angola 3.” All
three were convicted on separate charges during the late 1960’s. King,
Wallace and Woodfox would also gain notoriety for starting the only
Black Panthers Party prison chapter in 1971. Their connection with the
Black Panthers would ultimately lead to their continued incarceration
long after their original release dates as political prisoners of the US
government.

The viewer is lead through harrowing accounts of how
the Angola Black Panthers were the first to challenge prisoner
conditions within a severely corrupt penitentiary. Party members would
form anti-rape squads, fight for inmates to receive adequate work
equipment, and attempt to quell the rampant racism within the prison
itself. It is interesting to note that one of the goals of the Angola
Panthers was to desegregate inmate populations such that prison
officials couldn’t use racism and race baiting to stifle prisoner
solidarity and organization. It is now common practice for prisons to
segregate inmates by both race and “gang affiliation,” under the guise
of “keeping the peace” in the prison general pop. However, as the
history of the Angola 3 might demonstrate, such practices are masked
attempts to ensure violence and conflict between prisoners in order to
prevent any mass resistance movement by inmates against their captors.
As it is today, racism was utilized within Angola’s walls as a means of
controlling the inmate population. It was this blatant racism that would
lead to the extended, and nearly indefinite incarceration of the Angola
3.

King, Wallace, and Woodfox provide their own accounts as to
why they were found guilty of crimes they did not commit while in
prison. King was “investigated” over a period of 30 years for a murder
that took place before he even step foot in Angola. Wallace and Woodfox
were both convicted for the murder of a prison guard despite numerous
inconsistencies with case evidence. Both men were convicted based on the
“eyewitness” account of a (literally) blind informant.

As a
result of their convictions, the Angola 3 have spent more time in
solitary confinement than any other known person in the U.S. King spent a
total of 29 years in solitary, and was eventually released in 2001
after his original sentence was overturned and he plead guilty to a
lesser charge. Woodfox and Wallace spent a total of 36 years in solitary
until 2008, when they were finally moved to a maximum-security block.
The fight for Wallace and Woodfox’s release from Angola continues to
this day.

At the same time, O’Halligan should be praised for
going beyond the individual struggles of the Angola 3 in the film, where
he offers an extended conversation on the broader oppression of social
justice activists by the US federal government. Specifically, the film
dedicates significant coverage to the covert, insidious operations of
CONTELPRO over the last 50 years. It would be impossible to understand
the struggles of activists in the 1960’s and 70’s without explaining the
lengths to which the state will go to crush internal resistance. This
aspect of the film serves as an important lesson to contemporary
activists about the roles and tools of the state in the face of great
challenge, and is worth noting here.

Jimmy O’Halligan provides a
grim and stark view of life on the inside one of the last slave
plantations in America. The accounts of radicals and revolutionaries
such as Geronimo Pratt, Malik Rahim, Yuri Kochiyama and the narration of
Mumia Abu-Jamal add depth and grounded voice to the film. While the
pace of the documentary is a bit on the slow side (interview clips are
very long), it is full of rich historical accounts. The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation
would be an excellent source for those studying systemic racism, prison
reform or abolition, and contemporary social justice movements.